


It Will Grow Back

by femvimes



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: 25th of May, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Old Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-17 01:22:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18955063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femvimes/pseuds/femvimes
Summary: A retired Vimes takes up gardening, and tends to a lilac bush.





	It Will Grow Back

Sam Vimes was feeling his age this morning. Gods knew he was getting along in years. Old enough that if he went to bed that night and didn’t wake up, he wouldn’t be too upset and nobody would be surprised. Not morbid, just a thought you had when you got old. He survived way longer than he’d always expected. His sixteen-year-old self wouldn’t believe you if you told him that that he’d end his days in a mansion with his loving family, and not stabbed in an alley at three in the morning.

Vimes wasn’t so old that he couldn’t get up and tend to his garden, so he dragged himself out of bed even before the damn birds were up. He paused in pulling on his boots and gardening clothes to give Sybil a kiss on her wrinkled cheek. He found himself hoping more and more that she’d outlive him. He didn’t know what he’d do without her.

Young Sam’s wife Almira beat him awake, though maybe she hadn’t gone to sleep. Her insomnia had gotten worse as she’d gotten older. Either way, she wasn’t surprised to see him. Old people wake up early.

“Coffee or chai?” she asked as he entered the kitchen. He hesitated, then said,

“Chai. Better on the system.”

She smiled fondly and poured him a cup, which he accepted gratefully. They leaned against the table and the counter, respectively, and settled into a companionable silence. Vimes had had his doubts about Young Sam, his wife, and their children moving in. His qualms were mostly for Young Sam’s sake; surely he didn’t want to move back in with their parents? Almira turned out to be a boon, caring for him and Sybil enough that they didn’t have to hire a nurse. Vimes and Sybil adored their grandchildren, Darius and Beta, and would much rather have them live closer than further away.

“And you’ll probably be the master of the house soon, so it’ll be good for them to get used to the place,” Vimes had said to his son and daughter-in-law on more than one occasion.

“Oh, Dad,” Young Sam would say with a roll of his eyes. As if he couldn’t imagine Vimes not existing. Most of the city couldn’t, though they’d survived well enough when he retired. 

“What’s on the docket for today, Father?” Almira asked. 

“Seeing as it’s the 24th,” Vimes said meaningfully, “I’ll be getting some lilacs ready for the trip to the cemetery tomorrow. And the kale is coming in nicely. Sybil will be thrilled,” he added sourly. “The orange tree isn’t doing well, I’m afraid. Your poor brother’s sapling just isn’t taking well to the climate.”

“Ah, well.” Almira waved a hand. “It was always a long shot anyway. I don’t think Jamshedji quite understands just how much it rains here.”

“Speaking of which, it’s looking a little cloudy, today,” said Vimes, setting his cup down. “I’d best get out there before the rain starts.”

Almira helped him put on his coat, and then he was out the back door, past the dragon sheds, and into a place the boy from Cockbill Street never thought he’d enjoy: his garden.

The gardening began a few years back, when he was working part-time to smooth the transition of power between himself and the newly-minted Commander Angua. Young Sam was off at school, and Old Sam rattled around the house like a billiard ball inside a very large trunk. How the ball got into the trunk Vimes didn’t know, but here was the big house, empty of running feet or laughter, and here was Vimes, rattling away. 

It was a week into his semi-retirement, and he was re-building the sliding rail trap on the roof for the second time when Sybil opened a window and stuck her head out.

“Up here again, dear?”

“It’s the greasing on these rails, they still squeak a bit,” he said, and slid one of the (rather ingenious, he thought) disguised roof section across its rail in defense. It squeaked mournfully. Sybil looked equally mournful at him, and shook her head.

“You need to find a hobby, Sam,” and then quelled his open mouth and next words with a finger. “A _different_ hobby. One that doesn’t cause grievous bodily harm to any poor workman or woman or dwarf or work-whoever who next fixes our roof.”

Vimes took her point and started packing up his tools. Then he looked around. “Uh, dear? Do you think you could help me? My joints have seized up and I seem to be stuck up here.”

The next day, he ambled down to the bottom of the garden where the gardener and gardener’s boy played horseshoes on their day off. The satisfying clink, clink echoing up the garden gave him hope that they were going at it today. The gardener, who had been hired around the time Sam and Sybil were engaged, had to be older than Sam by at least twenty years, and yet here he was, leathery-faced as ever and playing a sport that by all accounts should have thrown out his shoulder. 

_May we all live to be so fit,_ Vimes thought, and watched them from a distance until the boy noticed him and gave him a jerky nod. No, not boy. Girl. Where had the most recent boy, Treach, gone off to?*

*Vimes tried to make a point of knowing all his staffs’ names, since, in another life and down another trouser leg of time, he could have been one of them. Also, it was just polite.

“Mornin’, sir,” she said, and then the gardener, Mr. Altman, also looked up and nodded amiably to Vimes.

“And what might we be able to help you with, Master?” he asked, using the honorific Vimes had given up asking him not to use decades ago.

How was he going to broach this subject? _I’m bored, entertain me_ perhaps cut to the root of the matter but Vimes wasn’t going to state it so baldly. He should have thought about it on his way over.

“Sybil says I need a hobby,” is what he ended up saying, rather lamely.

Altman’s chapped lips, much the same color as the rest of his face, cracked into a smile.

“Want to join? We’ll go easy on you.”

They did not “go easy” by any description, but as Vimes lost game after game, he let himself fall into the rhythm of the swing and toss. Once Altman and the young woman, whose name he soon learned was Vera, got used to his presence, they chattered away about what tasks they needed to complete for the garden and their troubles with the local seed suppliers. Vimes learned far much more than he needed to about the Sto Conglomerate monopoly on tree saplings, Harry King’s rising prices on fertilizer now that the city was cleaner, and Vera’s love life with several of the local Clacks operators. He didn’t speak for much of it, and he didn’t need to. 

But when Vera began to talk about her strategy for removing the Ramkin estate’s overgrown lilac bush, Vimes said simply,

“No. The lilacs stay.”

Vera looked questioningly at him, but shrugged and replied, “All right, your grace.”

“I told you, he’s got a thing about lilacs,” Altman whispered in an old man’s whisper that you could hear from twenty paces away across a crowded room. 

Vera’s eyes darted towards Vimes, then she asked Altman, “Can’t I at least prune it?”

They both looked at Vimes.

“Can she prune it?” Altman asked dubiously, as if he knew the answer for sure and would never stoop to question his grace’s orders.

Vimes hesitated, then dropped the horseshoe he’d been holding and wiped his hands on his trousers. “Tell you what. I’m rubbish at this game. Can I help you prune the lilac tree?”

He was outfitted with a thick pair of leather gloves and a lethally-sharpened pair of shears. Altman took the long pole with the string-pulled blade, saying it was too complicated for the master to try just yet.

“And best be careful with those shears, Master,” he said, nodding to them. “Treat them as respectfully as you would a sword.”

Vimes didn’t need telling. He’d seen these sticking out of people often enough times. A close third in domestic murder weapon, behind scissors or kitchen knives. Vimes reminded himself to come to the garden shed if the house was ever under attack and his traps failed.

The three of them proceeded out to the lilac bush, with Vimes’s Proceeding fitting right in. He could instantly see why the lilac bush needed trimming. It was thirty feet tall at least, and almost as wide, whip-thin branches and flowers going every which way. The smell was overpowering. It was a smell, even forty-five years later, that still reminded him of blood.

“I’ll start from the top,” Altman said, hefting the string-pulled blade pole. “Go ahead and hack away, Master. It’ll all grow back later. Just avoid the branches with blooms on them.”  
He and Vera and Altman chopped in silence for at least an hour. It was much more physical than Vimes was expecting. He relished the ache in his arms. Gods, when was the last time he’d even broken into a run? He remembered one of his last conversations with Dr. Lawn before the man had passed away.

“Just try and stay healthy, Mr. Vimes,” he’d said drily. “I’d like you to outlive me this time.”

Altman stepped back and wiped a hand across his brow. Vera and Vimes joined him to survey their handiwork. The bush looked much more manicured now. They even managed to trim it so it accentuated the blossoms. Using his shears, Vimes very carefully cut off a few for a bouquet. Altman stepped forward to help him, and soon he had an armful of flowers.

“For the graves,” Altman said, his serious eyes meeting Vimes. “Right, Master?”

Vimes nodded at him. “Right.”

Nearly every day since then, unless he had some kind of speech to give, Vimes joined Altman and Vera, and then just Vera when she took over as Head Gardener, down in the garden. He learned to plant tulip bulbs and grow tomatoes. He didn’t think he’d ever appreciate eating vegetables, but he appreciated growing them. He started looking forward to the family visit to Ramkin Hall and its even bigger gardens there. He saw Sybil smiling at him out of the corners of his eyes when she thought he wasn’t looking. 

With the two of them no longer on the Board for the Free Hospital, Sybil and Vimes decided they needed a cause together, and started the Healthy Families project, which encouraged Ankh-Morpork’s poorer families to eat fresh food. Sybil and her army of friends and supporters went to classrooms to teach children what the vegetables they ate actually looked like.* Every spring they hosted a day for families to come to Scoone Avenue and pick food from their garden. Pseudopolis Yard was always fully-stocked with a fruit bowl.

*Or, in some cases, just what vegetables looked like.

He still was no expert, not like Vera, but she’d set him loose on the vegetable patch or a tree that needed pruning and let him do his own thing. They kept the lilac tree well-trimmed, every year. And every year, he and a dwindling number of people took the bouquets up to the graves, until it was just him and Reg. Soon it would be just Reg. And he was all right with that.

Today, May 24th, he gathered the usual bouquet of purple blooms and breathed in the scent. Even the blood faded, with time. Vera, who was trying one last time to get the orange tree to bloom, gave him a friendly nod and didn’t bother him. He was always in a contemplative mood around the 25th. 

He stooped to put the lilacs in a basket, and pressed a hand to his back. He had an undefined ache there he hadn’t told Dr. Igor about yet. It would come up in his next appointment, which were scheduled more and more often lately. 

He picked up the basket with gnarled hands, shuffled sun-burnt and scarred legs, and started making his way back towards home. He needed to put these in water, and then he could spend some time with his grandchildren.

Vimes had so many things he hoped would outlive him: the revolutionized Watch (that he would never, even on a good day, take all the credit for), a beautiful family, and a healthy garden. Those were the things that Vimes wanted to survive. He didn’t know whether or not he would wake up in the morning. If he did, he’d appreciate these things anew.

**Author's Note:**

> For my birthday, my mom bought me a bunch of plants and helped me pot them. I found myself thinking it might be the kind of thing that Sam Vimes would enjoy. When I realized it was nearly the 25th, I incorporated that theme as well.


End file.
